Amazon.com: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (9780452283916): Greg Palast: Books

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Whether one believes Katherine Harris’s claim that Palast’s conclusions are "twisted and maniacally partisan" or Tribune Magazine’s declaration that he is "the greatest investigative reporter of our time," one thing is plain: Palast does not shy away from controversy. This collection of reports touches on a number of familiar topics, including Enron, the presidential election of 2000 and the Bush family’s purported connection to Saudi Arabia. These issues have been explored in more depth by other authors, but what makes this audiobook so entertaining is its all-star anti-administration cast, including Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo and Jim Hightower. All of the readings are well-executed, but the full plate of narrators can cause confusion. It’s unclear how the text is divided up amongst the readers, and at any moment, a new chapter may begin with a new, unidentified voice. Despite the guessing-game nature of the audio presentation, this is still a fun, provocative listen.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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A cult fave among progressives . . . The guts for [Michael] Moore's screed on the 2000 election came from Greg Palast." -- The Village Voice

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278 of 301 people found the following review helpful

The Last Reporter

By Panopticonman on September 14, 2002

Format: Hardcover

Greg Palast won't shut up. He won't shut up about how Jeb Bush and his lieutenant stole the election from Gore through a vicious manipulation of the voter rolls. He won't shut up about how cheaply Tony Blair's government can be bought. He won't shut up about how mainstream journalism is in thrall to the prevailing free market corporate ethos. He won't shut up about the Big Lie perpertreated by Milton Friedman and his gang that markets promote democracy, that markets are engines of viture. He shows with unshakable research that instead that instead of breeding virture and freedom, markets breed corruption, inequality, and through a politically moribund media, moral complacency.
The opening chapter on the high-tech mechanism that the Bush camp in Florida put in place before the elections in 2000 to expunge African-Americans from voter rolls is worth the price of the book. Palast tells us how Jeb's gang reinstated Jim Crow laws in the New South by hiring a database firm with strong ties to the Texas Republican party to compare lists of voters with lists of felons and purge names from the rolls that "matched" in only the most tenous ways. Roughly 60,000 voters, most of them Black (because the prison archipelago in the United States imprisons mostly Blacks) were stripped of the fundamental right of voting. Why take blacks off the rolls? Because, as Palast notes, better than 9 in 10 Blacks vote for Democrats. He personalizes these facts in the person of a Black minister who had met and broken bread with Jeb Bush on numerous occasions. The minister showed up to vote at his local precinct where he had been voting for over 20 years and discovered that his name had vanished from rolls.Read more ›

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82 of 86 people found the following review helpful

One of the Best Books Money Can Buy

By Maginot on April 3, 2003

Format: Paperback

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" is a must read for anyone-conservative or liberal-who wants to get a different perspective on what is happening in the world than the one that is consistently portrayed by the consolidated corporate media. While the controversial title of this book implies a liberal critique of Western values and institutions, it actually accomplishes something very different. Veteran investigative reporter, Greg Palast publishes some of the news stories that the consolidated corporate media refuses to report. While some may blanch at the targets of Palast's investigations, which include corrupt politicians, crooked companies, world finance organizations, and the consolidated corporate media, few can deny the accuracy and integrity of his reports. Palast is an independent reporter who originally specialized in racketeering investigations. His methods include scrupulously studying corporate documents, and examining the testimony of whistleblowers, many of whom approach him personally out of disgust toward their parent organizations. Palast does not work for a for-profit media company and is not beholden to corporate interests. This makes him one of the few honest voices in public life.
Chief among Palast's exposés is the illegal manner in which Florida Secretary of State, Kathleen Harris, and Governor Jeb Bush illegally denied tens of thousands of African American citizens their right to vote in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. Palast details the methods used by Bush and Harris to exclude eligible African American from voting such as manipulating database records to wrongfully categorize thousands of African Americans as felons, or wrongfully claiming that convicted felons who has completed their sentences in other states could not vote in Florida.Read more ›

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204 of 224 people found the following review helpful

How Florida Profiled Blacks and Stole the 2000 Election

By Subarachi on March 6, 2002

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

In a time when fiduciary responsibilities and concern for stockholders have reduced most American newsrooms to ghost towns populated only by cut and paste journalists, Greg Palast, an American working for the Observer in London, still does what reporters used to do. He digs through the evidence, particularly the emails, the government records and the financial reports to get the hard evidence.
His evidence on the 2000 Florida Presidential election voting process is both astonishing and terribly troubling.
Palast also offers clear documentary evidence that Blacks were racially profiled to be eliminated from voter rolls by Florida's voter/felon purge. Essentially, at the behest of Katherine Harris, under Jeb Bush's close watch, Florida systematically and intentionally denied voting rights to approximately 90,000 voters whose right to vote in Florida was legally unquestionable--and over 54% of them were Black. Since Florida Blacks voted 93% for Al Gore, Palast's remarkably detailed book makes it perfectly evident that illegally purged Black votes prevented Florida from voting overwhelmingly for Al Gore and giving Gore the presidency.
Palast also demonstrates that the issue is not one of Black incompetence. Voting machines were set to accept double voted, and therefore uncountable, ballots in Black districts, while they were set to reject double voted ballots in White districts, so Whites could recast their ballots. In other counties with heavily Black populations, the automatic protection systems which reject double voted ballots were simply turned off to "reduce costs."
So while Bush "won" the presidency on a 5-4 Supreme Court vote which said, essentially, that Americans don't have the Constitutional right to vote for the President, something far more sacred was lost in the Florida voting process--the right of every eligible, adult American to have his or her vote counted and to have that vote determine who will lead our country.

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